Clerks Appraise ’86 Shoppers as OK Lot
In front of the store, five children crowded around a cage filled with barking mechanical dogs. By the counter, half a dozen customers waited with toys in their arms.
And at the cash register, Kim Michaelson, a clerk at Toys International’s store in South Coast Plaza, tried to ring up purchases while fielding a question about the store’s yo-yo supply.
“Everyone is supposed to be chipper at Christmas,” an exhausted Michaelson sighed during a rare break in sales. “But I was stocking shelves till 2 last night and here selling at 9:30 this morning. I am not a happy person. But I guess this is just life in the store at Christmas.”
So it seems. The hours are long, the pace is frenzied and sometimes the customers are rude--but it’s all in a day’s work for store workers at Christmastime.
“It’s hectic,” said Ria Garza, a customer-pickup employee who has been working 12-hour shifts for the past two weeks at Toys R Us in Santa Ana. “Some people can be really nice, but some say, ‘Where’s your merchandise? I want it now.’
“This year I’ve been jabbed at, run over by little kids and hit in the head” by the trunk of a customer’s car. But it’s the only time of the year I get most of my overtime . . . and I enjoy it.”
Store workers had strong but varied opinions on whether this year’s holiday shoppers are more rude--or more cheerful--than in Christmases past.
“Last year people seemed to be in a bad mood,” but this year’s customers have been “friendly and wonderful and really terrific,” said Merian Snow, 29, owner of the Scandia Down Shop in South Coast Plaza.
On Saturday, when her narrow, 490-square-foot store filled with customers and she and two clerks didn’t have time to help all of them, “the customers began to help us write up charge slips. And they were selling to each other,” Snow recalled, noting that one woman talked another customer into buying a $300 down comforter.
Mike Nisbet, manager of Hickory Farms, also in South Coast Plaza, said his store has been so busy the last four days that when the lines form at the cashier’s stand, “all you have to worry about is whiplash.”
Most of his customers have been a joy to wait on, Nisbet said, although “There was one lady who was just foul. She was so upset that she had to be between three other people in line. I really feel sorry for her.”
But Blanca Covarrubias, another Toys R Us clerk, said she felt worse for the employees. “Sometimes we have the rudest people,” she said. “They get upset because we don’t have something. This lady came in every morning to see if we had (a toy called) Laser-tag.” The store was stocking Photon, a similar toy, but never did stock Laser-tag, Covarrubias said, and the woman “got really upset. She yelled.”
At the Santa Claus pavilion at South Coast Plaza, Kevin Suarez, one of the jolly old gent’s helpers, said most children and their parents have been in a good mood as they suffered through a sometimes 2 1/2-hour wait to see St. Nick.
“It’s only at the last minute, when we shut down the line, that they complain. They say, ‘I came all the way from Bermuda to see Santa Claus,’ ” said Suarez, who made it clear he didn’t always believe them.
At the Southwest Pet Center in Santa Ana, cashier Cindy Wilcox said the Christmas crowds seem to come in spurts. “At times it’s really busy, at times it’s quiet,” said Wilcox, who held a green-cheeked parrot named Tennessee-Ta on her hand.
The bird, which sells for $349, has attracted some interest but so far no one wanted to take him home for Christmas, bird saleswoman Linda Jaworski said. But that was all right, she said. “He has a good home here.”
In Huntington Beach, Josie Fond, co-owner of a new gift store called “Be Dazzled,” said this Christmas is hectic but “kinda fun. Everybody is into fun stuff,” Fond said, noting that her customers are buying such items as Betty Boop T-shirts.
Between the press of customers and the strange gifts they are buying, “I would describe this Christmas as crazy,” Fond said.
